Optical wireless communications systems today despite providing much higher bandwidth have found only niche applications due to the necessity for line-of-sight operation, high atmospheric attenuation over the wireless channel especially in fog, the high cost of lasers on a per watt basis, and lack of misalignment tolerance necessitating the addition of high-cost pointing and tracking systems. To overcome the misalignment problem, omni-directional optical wireless antennas (“omni-antennas”) have been proposed that send and receive optical wireless signals in all directions, including omni-antennas which function in a mobile ad-hoc network (or MANET). Most current omni-antennas are contemplated at low power level often with LEDs for purposes of achieving broad transmitter divergence angles and wide field-of-view receivers. However, such implementations provide only limited ranges and are proposed with components with limited modulation rates which limits throughput and therefore have limited applications, such as indoor local area networks (LANs) or other confined spaces.
Other teachings contemplate 360 degree transmit coverage with mirrors but do not address detector field-of-view. Others provide for devices to have IR transmitter and receiver pairs but contemplate the network as static in a master-slave configuration.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a system and method that takes into account and resolves at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as possibly other issues.